Vulnerability of High Arctic Indigenous Communities and Ecosystems to Rising Ocean Temperatures

Nature Communications, July 22

On our present climate trajectory, the North Water ecosystem (NOW), a unique open-water ecosystem surrounded by sea ice between the northwestern coast of Greenland and Ellesmere Island in Canada, almost certainly can no longer serve as a winter refuge for keystone High Arctic mammals, or as central fishing and hunting ground for Inuit communities in the region as well as commercial fishing activities. Climate reconstruction over the past several thousand years, using lake and marine sediment cores, showed a highly productive ecosystem at the time of first human habitation in the region, followed by a period of actual human abandonment of Greenland during a period of abrupt warming, with high instability of sea and land ice in the region and decreased productivity. The presence of a productive and stable NOW relies directly on the stability of sea ice arches south of the Nares Strait, west of Greenland, an area of some of the Arctic’s oldest and thickest sea ice. Multiple lines of evidence show increasing sea ice instability in this sector over the last two decades, detrimental to this ecosystem. Continued anthropogenic warming can be expected to exacerbate Arctic sea ice thinning and loss, further destabilizing the North Water region and threatening the livelihoods of High Arctic Inuit communities.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24742-0

ICCI Note: An earlier research paper outlining the vulnerability of sea ice arches in the Nares Strait was captured this January 8, 2021: https://iccinet.org/oldest-and-thickest-arctic-sea-ice-endangered/